Targets and Actions under the Copenhagen Accord

Targets and Actions under the Copenhagen Accord

The Copenhagen Accord[1], a political agreement[2] struck by world leaders at the 2009 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, calls on participating countries to pledge specific actions they will undertake to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. This represents the first time ever that all of the world’s major economies have offered explicit international climate pledges.

In the case of Annex I (developed) countries, the nonbinding Accord calls for quantified economy-wide emission targets for 2020. In the case of non-Annex I (developing) countries, it calls for “nationally appropriate mitigation actions,” but does not specify what form they should take. (Least developed and small island countries “may undertake actions voluntarily and on the basis of support.”)

As of May 24, 2010, 99 parties (counting the 27 member states of the European Union as a single party) had filed submissions with the U.N. climate change secretariat :

Click here[4]for a full summary of targets and actions under the Copenhagen Accord (pdf).

Click here[5] for a side-by-side comparison of main provisions of the Copenhagen Accord, the draft core decision texts carried forward from Copenhagen in the UNFCCC Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA), and the text prepared by the AWG-LCA Chair in May 2010 to facilitate further negotiations.

Mitigation Pledges Under the Copenhagen Accord

In the Copenhagen Accord, countries agree that “deep cuts in global emissions are required… so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius…” To date, nearly 50 parties (counting the European Union as a single party) have submitted specific mitigation pledges under the Accord. Several analyses (summarized here[6]) have assessed whether these pledges are consistent with the goal of limiting global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius.

Our review of these analyses finds that:

Most show the pledges are inadequate to achieve a 2-degree goal, and instead imply a global emissions pathway leading to 3 to 3.9 degrees of warming.

Collectively, the pledges would reduce global emissions between 4 percent and16 percent below business as usual (BAU) in 2020. (All projections of the pledges’ impact on emissions show ranges of reductions because many of the pledges specify ranges, with the more ambitious end of the range applying if stipulated conditions are met. ) A 2-degree pathway requires reductions of 21 percent to 26 percent below BAU.

Pledges by developed countries would reduce their emissions 10 percent to 13 percent below BAU in 2020, and pledges by developing countries would reduce their emissions 6 percent to 9 percent below BAU.